I had the opportunity to catch Lisa Harouni: A primer on 3D printing on TED recently. It’s a terrific introduction to what 3D printing is and why it’s important, especially for the manufacturing sector.

In preparing for the Stepping up workshop one of the themes that emerged in our thinking was “mass customisation” (including its relationship to “authenticity” which also manifests in social media). Mass customisation refers to the ability of customers to selectively design the products they purchase. Lisa highlights how this can then be extended to allow customers to produce the products at home as well.

Products can be quite complex, as the AirBike demonstrates. And 3D printers are rapidly decreasing in cost, with basic DIY models like the MakiBox coming it at USD$350. That provides some indication of what Harouni is referring to when she says their affordable and crossing over.

In her TED talk, Lisa also explores how just product data can be shipped, instead of physical product, to deliver a product to a customer. She also outlines how distributed manufacturing might work, where a customer defines their requirements and the data is shipped to a local manufacturer for production and delivery (with the potential of significantly lowering carbon footprint).

This type of distributed model brings to mind RiverSimple, which is a new car concept based on the principles of the hyper car, introduced by the Rocky Mountains Institute and outlined in more depth in Natural Capitalism.

Part of RiverSimple’s vision is to distribute manufacturing to local hubs, rather than centralising manufacturing in one country, or distributing manufacturing across a global supply chain. (As an aside, I see this approach as having both parallels and coming into conflict with Porter and Kramer’s “industry cluster” principle for creating shared value. Perhaps for another post…)

I’m interested in seeing how technologies like 3D printing develop, enabling these kinds of decentralised manufacturing models and enabling companies like RiverSimple to fulfil their vision. It’s worth noting that 3D

Photo from one of Mickey Kovari’s Flashpoint Labs at Evans High School. Photo by Nana.

Just a quick note to say that I’ll be doing a short (<20 min) presentation and joining a panel discussion with Mickey Kovari and Janine Cahill at COFA on Tuesday night (3 Apr).

The theme of the evening is Art, Design and Social Enterprise and we’ll each be exploring our experiences in designing for sustainability. Given the depth of experience of the other panelists I expect I’ll get a lot out of the evening.

The event is part of the COFA Talks series. Details are:

Date: April 3, 2012
Time: 6–8pm
Where:
COFA lecture theatre: EGO2
Cnr Oxford Street and Greens Road
Paddington, NSW

If you took a quick trip through the archives of this blog you would probably notice that we facilitate a lot of workshops and presentations (both for our clients, but also at public events and conferences), especially on topics that encourage sustainability and social innovation.

With that in mind we’re delighted to be running our first stand-alone workshop on 28 & 29 March 2012 on these themes. Zumio associate Allison Heller, the wonderful Connie Comber at Re-Imagine Business and I have teamed up to develop a two-day program that ties together our combined learnings into what we hope will be an engaging set of sessions for business owners and managers.

From the workshop blurb:

Business models for driving profitability are changing.

Customer loyalty, high performance teams and strong business networks are increasingly reliant on collaboration and building long-term relationships.

Businesses need to be engaged in the new socially-networked economy and that means accepting greater transparency and adopting socially-aware values and principles.

Clients and communities expect more of businesses today.

This workshop will:

• Provide you with an overview of latest trends shaping the business sector: collaboration, shared value and harnessing the power of the socially-networked economy to your advantage.
• Lead you through a series of case studies of businesses that have been transformed to build resilience and achieve sustainable growth.
• Provide you with practical tools to develop a resilience-based business strategy to drive new market opportunities.

The first day will focus on the clear trends impacting the business community, representing both risks and opportunities depending on an organisation’s preparedness. The second day will focus on specific case studies of local and international businesses that are harnessing these trends and getting ahead of the curve.

As with all of our workshops, the two days will emphasise interactive and hands-on activities to help apply the key principles and learnings that emerge from the sessions in a practical way.

There’s more detail over at the event booking page. We’d be delighted to hear any feedback you have on the event and outline.

And you can get a 5% discount by using the discount code “earlybird” before 9 Mar 2012.

P.S. if you think someone else might be interested, we’ve got a PDF flyer you can send around or print (if you must) that contains all the essentials.

A few weeks back I received this invite via email from colleague Duncan Rintoul, of the Institute for Innovation in Business and Social Research (IIBSOR) at University of Wollongong. Given the topic, I thought it was worthwhile sharing here also:

AES tech-eval: A new SIG focused on the intersection between evaluation and technology

These days it is no surprise to see mainstream and niche programs making use of tech-based platforms: web-based self-help tools, mobile applications, SMS-based reminder systems, viral videos, conversations on social media… the list is much longer than this, and ever growing.

We need to develop capacity among evaluators to work confidently in this environment, designing and executing sound evaluations that understand what these technologies are, how they can be used and how their impact can be measured.

There are also great opportunities for using technology in our evaluations — wikis, online forums, online surveys, social media monitoring… again the list is long and growing.

Spilling over from one of the parallel sessions at the 2011 AES conference, a crew of around 15 people has started pulling together a new AES Special Interest Group around this intersection between evaluation and technology: AES tech-eval.

It’s early days yet, but two things you can do for now:

• Join the email listserv
• Check out v1.0 of their resource library of conference papers, published evaluations and other resources for evaluating tech-based programs and program elements.

Go on, join them! If technology freaks you out, swap fear of the unknown with curiosity and see where it takes you. If you’re already working comfortably in this space, help lead your colleagues forward.

Tim Cotter writes in his latest “Awake” newsletter on “Do positive messages lead to more positive outcomes?”, which looks at the efficacy of positive and negative messaging in relation to behaviour change. I’ve read a lot of different articles that talk about the “loss aversion bias” and many others on how positive messaging can achieve better results, and wondered about the two.

The up-shot is “it depends” — primarily where the person is on their change journey.

Are we primarily trying to draw attention to the issue, or get already-concerned people into action? If we apply Obermiller’s observations to the bypass patients mentioned earlier, it is clear that the people in question were already painfully aware of the seriousness of the issues. So the positive approach to getting them into action was successful because it worked on motivating and supporting them to act.

Tim concludes by saying “These findings also highlight the importance of doing sound research before committing effort and resources to behaviour change initiatives.” Couldn’t agree more — that’s certainly our approach…

(Oh, and I recommend subscribing to Tim’s newsletter, which is available on his website.)

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had the pleasure of presenting at UX Australia last week. As is tradition, my presentation is now up on Slideshare:

The presentation centres around our experience on the FlavourCrusader project — specifically considerations of behaviour change models and the workshop process we undertook earlier in the year at Social Innovation Sydney.

The presentation makes mention of Les Robinson’s “5 doors” model — just a quick mention that Les runs workshops on this model and facilitation techniques, including some later this month.

My understanding is that the talks were recorded, so once the audio is ready I’ll do my best to sync it all up… But in the meantime you can get the gist from the the presentation + speaker notes (PDF 18.3 MB), which contains further pointers to some of the references I mentioned in my talk.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the research process — both behind the scenes and as participants — but special mention to Sharon Lee and Penny Hagen for their input into both the workshopping process and presentation, and to BJ Fogg for kindly granting me permission to use his model in the slide deck.

I’ve just completed 3rd semester of my masters degree, and I wanted to share one of the papers I wrote on the concept of Platforms for shared value creation, that builds on the model that I outlined in my Web Directions South 2010 talk.

The paper, which is provided under a Creative Commons license:

…proposes a model of service delivery that has the potential to create shared value (Porter & Kramer 2011), addressing pressing societal and environmental needs while delivering commercial returns. The aim of this paper is to introduce the model — the “platform for shared value creation” (PSVC) — as a first step towards further exploration in the future. The model is not yet fully-formed and as such this paper should be considered more as “thinking in draft” for further discussion and refinement.

While the nature of these things means it takes an academic tone, I hope that it provides some value as a contribution to discussions around shared value, Collaborative Consumption, and social innovation. I would love to know any feedback you might have, so please drop me a note in the comments if you find it useful, or want to challenge or probe any of its assertions.

Just a quick note to say that I’ll be attending the Communities and Technology conference happening in Brisbane next week. In addition to attending the Friday and Saturday presentations, I’ll be participating in the Food(ing): Between Human-Computer and Human-Food-Experience workshop on Wednesday.

I’m particularly looking forward to the workshop as an opportunity to learn from others working in this area, and to share my experience from both my masters studies work and the learnings from the FlavourCrusader initiative. In related news, my participation in the workshop stems from a proposed book chapter that my friend and colleague Penny Hagen and I proposed to the Urban Informatics folks at QUT, that hopefully will be going ahead soon, but I’ll have more on that in the coming months.

I’m really excited to be presenting at the UX Australia conference this year, being held in Sydney. I’ll be presenting on our learnings from our work to date with the FlavourCrusader initiative, including the session we ran at the last Social Innovation Sydney event.

My session is called Eating our 2 and 5: Designing to change food behaviours using mobile devices and will explore how:

• Designing for sustained behaviour change benefits from consideration of additional factors than those found in a purely commercial context
• User experience techniques can be utilised to provide an understanding of “enabling” (and conversely ‘disabling’) factors of behaviour change, as these often present themselves only in context of use
• Novel rapid testing and research techniques can be utilised to simulate such context in a group testing environment
• User interface design choices take on extra gravity when considering behaviour change as an outcome. For example, applied appropriately, game mechanics can be a powerful driver to encourage desired behaviours beyond product use.

On that last point I’ll definitely be interested to attend Paris Buttfield-Addison’s talk Gamification sucks: Lessons from the field, though I suspect from the description we have somewhat similar views on the matter ;)

In fact, I’m humbled to be included in such a diverse and inspiring field of presenters, including contributions from our friends at Digital Eskimo, Rob Manson, and Oliver and Rod from Mobile Experience, among others.

It looks like a fantastic event, which given the feedback I’ve heard from past years’ events is the norm — well worth picking up an early-bird ticket for I’d say…

Your Carbon Footprint that is…

We are proactive in reducing our carbon footprint and being aware of our impact and possibilities to reduce our impact on our environment.  In addition to trying our air travel, through Climate Friendly, and wanted to offset the emissions of our other (essential) emissions-intensive activities.

Climate Friendly works with corporations, businesses and individuals to measure, manage, and offset their carbon footprint, by  providing a quick and easy calculation tool, to take action immediately.  While these tools allow you to calculate offsets for flights, electricity and car travel, we wanted to offset more than those things, so we sent an email to Climate Friendly to see if they could help.  They quickly responded and sent us spreadsheet for us to fill in and  return to them to finish the calculations.

Before we could complete the spreadsheet, we needed obtain certain figures, make calculations and implement procedures to produce more accurate figures — so we thought we’d share how we went about doing it…

The first figure we tackled was our electricity, dividing the KW usage (from our electricity bill) by 5 working days, divided by the staff members.

For paper consumption, we went through our invoices and extracted all paper purchases i.e. A4 80gsm, A4 110gsm, FlipChart per 60gsm etc. worked out an average over the period of time and tracked it in a spreadsheet.

Taxi travel and freight figures were extracted from our cashflow reports from our accounting system.  For paper waste, we didn’t empty our 7 litre recycling bin for 4 weeks and measured how much we filled it for that period.

At the end of the day these figures are not absolute, but by continually measuring our consumption, our hope is that we’ll no longer be grappling for figures, working on guesstimates or making assumptions.  We’ll have a more comprehensive understanding of how big our footprint really is.

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